Law helps flag fraud against seniors

Dawn Shaw, a retired legal secretary in northern Maine, made two stops weekly without fail. One was her church. The other was her local bank, where she swapped stories about her children and their families with the branch manager.

Gradually, Shaw, a widow, began showing signs of confusion, prompting the manager to check her account. The manager found an automatic monthly withdrawal had recently been set up. She knew Shaw did her banking in person, not electronically, so she notified Shaw’s nearest daughter, Cathy. They discovered someone had used Shaw’s banking information to steal her money.

“It wasn’t a lot of money,” said Shaw’s other daughter, Judith, who is the administrator of the Maine Office of Securities. “But it made me realize why it is important for frontline bank employees to identify red flags early.”

It was not only her meticulous mother who was being defrauded. In the last decade, Judith Shaw said, there has been a steady rise in financial fraud against older people in Maine. Her mother’s experience a few years ago prompted this idea: Encourage state officials to start a pilot program that would train bank employees to recognize suspicious activity, like sudden large transfers, in exchange for greater protection from legal liability for reporting it.

In early 2014, hundreds of employees at Maine’s banks and other financial institutions began learning how to recognize unusual account activity that might indicate fraud or financial exploitation.

The pilot program went so well that one of Maine’s senators, Susan Collins, introduced legislation to take it national. The result, the Senior Safe Act, which became law in May, gives banks that accept such training more certainty that they would not be punished for disclosing Banks continues on D2